Women Funding Women’s Education

Women Funding Women’s Education

Scholarship

Another Harriet Fitzgerald Scholarship in the amount of $10,000 will be awarded for the 2018-2019 academic year to a woman attending an undergraduate women’s college in the United States. The Sunflower Initiative, established by alumnae and friends of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, offers the Harriet Fitzgerald Scholarship to honor one of the College’s most distinguished alumnae. It will provide a promising young woman with financial support to attend a woman’s college where her intellect and talents will be nurtured and where she will receive an education preparing her to participate fully in public life.

The Scholarship Committee welcomes applications from highly motivated women who are passionate about learning and desire to attend a woman’s college in the United States. The successful candidate must possess a stellar high school record, provide outstanding references, have a sincere desire to make a contribution to society, and show evidence of strong character and leadership qualities, as well as breadth and depth of interests. For best consideration, applicants should have an unweighted GPA of at least a 3.7 and either a composite SAT score of at least 1900 (scoring through 2016) or 1350 (scoring since 2016) or a composite ACT score of at least 27 with no single ACT score below 25. International students should be able to arrange to take the SAT or ACT in their home countries.

All women expecting to start their first full term of college at an undergraduate women’s college in the Fall 2018 term are eligible to apply. Graduating high school seniors are obviously eligible, as are those who have taken a gap year or two since graduating from high school, women who matriculated at college but left prior to the completion of their first semester and now plan to start college again, and women who have taken a college course or two early while completing high school. Women who have completed one semester of college or more are not eligible. The Harriet Fitzgerald Scholarship is awarded for one year with the possibility of renewal.

The application deadline is February 1, 2018 by 11:59 pm EST. Applications, confidential letters of recommendation uploaded at our web site by recommenders, transcripts uploaded at our web site by high school counselors or registrars, and official reports of standardized test scores (which will be sent to us electronically) must all be received by that time.

Applicants may not send letters, test scores, or transcripts to us themselves. As is standard with official documents where authenticity and confidentiality are important, we will accept these materials only directly from letter-writers, testing services, or high school counselors or registrars.

Applicants are responsible for checking with the other parties who are uploading and sending test scores, transcripts, and letters to make sure that these materials are sent before the deadline. Please inform your letter-writers and high school counselors or registrars that they will find access to the brief forms they need to submit when they upload your letters and transcripts at our website: https://www.thesunflowerinitiative.com/scholarship/.

Letter-writers, counselors, registrars, and testing services are extremely busy during the college application season, so applicants should make their requests several weeks ahead of the due date, and check afterward with senders to make sure that they have sent the necessary documents.

The application or the uploading of a confidential letter must be completed in one round and cannot be checked later once the “submit” button has been clicked.

It is therefore wise to prepare in advance the PDFs of the documents to be uploaded

However, if you click on “submit” too soon, you may start over and submit a second time.

Complete applications include

An application form completed online at our website, including

An essay [which must be in PDF format] uploaded within the online application form

Entries about your activities, achievements, awards, and so on, which you may also supply by uploading an optional résumé, [which must also be in PDF format], within the online application form

Please note that the essay and any résumé uploaded with your application must be in PDF format. Those who read the applications have varying computer systems and software, so we can only guarantee that your essays and résumés will be read if they are submitted in PDF format.

Official high school or GED transcripts uploaded at our website by your high school counselor or registrar

Official report of SAT (code 7230) or ACT (code 1715) scores sent to us electronically by the testing service or by your high school counselor or registrar

3 Confidential letters of recommendation on letterhead and in PDF format. You should request at least two of the letters from people who can comment on your academic qualifications (teachers and counselors); it is helpful if the third letter comes from someone who can also comment on your extracurricular activities and personal character (this could also be a teacher or counselor, but perhaps a community member, club advisor, employer, or other non-family member); these letters must be submitted on-line to our website directly by the letter-writer.

Incomplete applications and late materials will not be considered.

The Scholarship Selection Committee will notify the winner of the award in April 2018.